Monday July 24, 2017

The dangerous game: Gamergate and the "alt-right"

For millions of people, online gaming is a magical -- even addictive -- space to escape to. A place for storytelling, exploration and adventure with other gamers.

Emma Vossen's love of gaming started when she was a kid growing up in small-town Ontario. Now as a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo Games Institute, she looks to gamer culture as a microcosm of how sexism is seeded and replicated within broader society, and she draws connections between gamer culture and the rise of the political extreme right. This is the latest in our Ideas from the Trenches series, exploring the exciting insights of PhD students across the country. **This episode originally aired November 30, 2016.

"All of a sudden it became completely normalized that the king of all Internet trolls [Donald Trump] became the president." — Anita Sarkeesian

Kishonna Gray -- visiting scholar and associate professor at MIT and founder of the Critical Gaming Lab at Eastern Kentucky University. She's also the author of Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins.

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